DIY: Adding SSD or HDD storage using an optical bay caddy

purchased this for my e1705:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=300567917332&ssPageName=ADME:L:OU:US:1123

tested 3 hdd's none of them work, is there anything more to it than put the hdd in caddy and caddy into laptop?
it gives power, i can hear it working, but no data nor any detection of the drive :?
what about jumpers on the hdd ?

edit: got it, it was the jumper, had to remove it.

 

So this doesn't work on laptop such as the Samsung Series 7 Chronos?
Because I replaced my 750GB 7200RPM HDD for a SDD and if I could use this optical bay caddy I can use both. Right?

 

u should, altho i heard that some caddys does not support 500+ gb drives as they eat more power and caddy wont b able to support it.

 

this is not true.

the only factor for 500+ gb drives is the size of the caddy.

the thickness of the drive is 12.5mm

i'm using 1tb drive in the caddy - it just works fine.

 

Could someone tell me if the optical bay caddy trick works on the Samsung Series 7 Chronos?

 

Sorry to say it, but you are shooting in the dark.
Small chance there is someone following this thread actually owning this model!

But personally I would take my chances.
I think it is safe to say the caddies work for the 95% of us (probably more).
It's not such an expensive bet either.

 

I just wonder in your situation, put SSD or HDD to the caddy is getting better performance? I think you can swap, right?

Sent from BlackBerry using Tapatalk

 

Pretty sure I have read that it's typically better to have the SSD in the main HD bay as the optical drives sometimes do not support full SATA speeds.

 

Hi all, Huge thread. Interesting read.

Ive got hold of a caddy for my Acer aspire 6920g. I wondered where you guys recommend getting fascia plates from.

I cant find a second hand one

 

Is the frontplate not removable?

 

I need the frontplate for current drive as I will be putting it into a external caddy,


The HDD bay I have is second hand hence having an incorrect fascia.

 

Hey guys, so I'm waiting for ssd and hd prices to go down... any ideas when?
And when they do go down, my laptop is a sager np5160. After looking around, will any of the 12.7 mm caddies fit?

Thanks

 

HDD will fall by 6-8 months.
SSD no idea.

 

If you monitor slickdeals.net for 'SSD' there are still decent deals to be had now and then from newegg and the like, for instance the Intel 320 160gb was just $165 after mail in rebate.

 

yeah and i jumped on a corsair force gt 120gb for 150 after rebate deal.
thats affordable and well worth the money

 

Does anyone know if a Gateway m285-e has a compatible Hard drive caddy?

all of these list like HP and stuff but I don't see any for Gateway...

 

Does anyone know?

 

Take out your DVD drive.
Measure the height of drive.
Its the size for your caddy.

 

I just received my caddies. I ordered a hdd caddy and an external usb caddy to put my DVD in it. Total cost 15,90$ including combined shipping.

I put my Vertex in there but I can't make it boot. When I press F9 the only option that I get is Notebook Hard Drive. Anybody booted from the caddy successfully?

My system is an 4530s H65. When I have my DVD in it it shows a boot option Notebook Upgrade Bay, but when I insert ODD caddy with ssd nothing

Pls advise...

4530s will take any 12.7mm hdd caddy

 

Put the SSD in the bay the hard drive is in currently, install windows onto that. Put the old HDD into the caddy aftwards or might try boot from that.

 

Also you should remove bookable windows partition from hard disk.
It may conflict with ssd.

 

If the bios isn't allowing boot off the SSD then can either:

1. Use EasyBCD to add an entry to your bootmenu that boots your Windows on your Vertex SSD in the optical bay caddy.

2. If using grub2 bootloader, add a Win7 entry to boot off your Vertex in optical bay caddy to the bootmenu.

3. If your bios hasn't initialised the Vertex as a drive such that bootmanagers in (1) and (2) above can't boot it then try using PLOP bootmanager booted off USB stick to attempt boot off the optical bay caddy.

 

Do the caddies for "ICH9M or newer" chipsets support SATA-III?

Is there any pitfall to buying a generic one from these eBay sellers from China (over something brandname)?

Assuming putting the faceplate from the optical drive on the caddy, does it matter if the caddy is specifically marketed as being compatible with your machine, or are all 9.5mm's basically the same?

 

I have a 4430s, and put my SSD into the main HD slot. I have an HDD in the caddy. Works better that way. Oddly enough, I still get the upgrade bay boot option when I press F9. I'm not sure what that's about. However, I can tell you that speed-wise, you're better off with the SSD in the main HD slot.

Also, do you have a link to the enclosure you ordered for the optical drive? I need to get one.

 

I have to say, that in all, this is the best thread I've seen in a longggggg time. I love it. I bought a cheapo optical HDD bay caddy and I have a 1TB WD Blue drive in there now and I love it.

By the way, if any 1TB drives popup that are 9.5mm and a reasonable price, please shout.

 

1TB WD 10TPVT is 12.5mm 750GB WD7500BPKT is 9.5mm.

 

Hey guys, I use This caddy and when it does the spindown to save battery life (DV6-6108us) I can't get it to spin back up and it ends up dismounting from My Computer.

This is problematic because all my multimedia files are on the HDD in the caddy. A working solution so far that I found was to increase the time before spindown to 99999 minutes, therefore canceling any potential spindown and keeping the drive mounted.

Pics Attached:

Before Spindown (Ignore Drive F


Power Settings for Spindown:


After Spindown (Settings changed to turn off HDD on battery after 1 minute):


Any thoughts on how I can get my HDD in my optical caddy to wake back up without a restart?

 

I Suggest bios update shall be useful.
do try latest bios update.

 

After installing it in my caddy, I occasionally hear a clicking sound. Is this because of the caddy, or is my hard drive is dying. Also posted what i'm getting for data from HD Tune 2.55. From the data, it doesn't look good but I'm not sure if I'm intrepreting this correctly.

HD Tune: WDC WD3200BEKT-60V5T1 Health

ID Current Worst ThresholdData Status
(01) Raw Read Error Rate 200 200 51 0 Ok
(03) Spin Up Time 176 174 21 2200 Ok
(04) Start/Stop Count 100 100 0 600 Ok
(05) Reallocated Sector Count 200 200 140 0 Ok
(07) Seek Error Rate 100 253 51 0 Ok
(09) Power On Hours Count 86 86 0 10915 Ok
(0A) Spin Retry Count 100 100 51 0 Ok
(0B) Calibration Retry Count 100 100 0 0 Ok
(0C) Power Cycle Count 100 100 0 547 Ok
(B8) (unknown attribute) 100 100 97 0 Ok
(BB) (unknown attribute) 100 100 0 0 Ok
(BC) (unknown attribute) 100 96 0 79 Ok
(BE) Airflow Temperature 57 25 40 43 Ok
(BF) G-sense Error Rate 1 1 0 99 Ok
(C0) Power Off Retract Count 200 200 0 34 Ok
(C1) Load Cycle Count 189 189 0 34318 Ok
(C2) Temperature 104 72 0 43 Ok
(C4) Reallocated Event Count 200 200 0 0 Ok
(C5) Current Pending Sector 200 200 0 0 Ok
(C6) Offline Uncorrectable 100 253 0 0 Ok
(C7) Ultra DMA CRC Error Count 200 200 0 0 Ok
(C8) Write Error Rate 100 253 51 0 Ok

Power On Time : 10915
Health Status : Ok

 

Any good HDD caddies for the Dell E6520, without paying $50+ for newmodus?

Thanks!

 

Samsung M8:

Newegg.com - SAMSUNG Spinpoint M8 HN-M101MBB 1TB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive

dunno if the price is all that reasonable yet, but it is better than just a little while ago. btw, the performance of these drive is really decent for a 5400rpm drives probably due to the platter density of two 500gb platters.

 

Even I would like to know this.
I am looking for caddy with eject switch.
My previous caddy was difficult to pull out.

 

There is a contest to choose the best thread of which this one has not been nominated :- http://forum.notebookreview.com/roundup/641438-nbr-amazing-content-contest.html

So consider voting for http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-...litebook-2530p-owners-lounge.html#post5193442 in it's place which is referenced in this thread

 

Hi - I could use some help - this morning I installed a 160gb hard drive into the caddy and it worked fine - main hard drive is a 500gb seagate.

Now I remove the 500gb seagate from primary slot in laptop - install intel ssd. Install 500gb seagate into caddy and plug in. Laptop won't boot - sits on loading screen forever - the loading bios bar moves but then stops and doesn't move again. The only setting it seems like I can change in the bios is ata/ahci - it is set to ahci - when i try changing it to ata, computer won't go into windows (500gb removed) - blue screen every time.

I am not sure what else to do at this point so any help would be very much appreciated. the laptop is a dell inspiron 1764.

thank you

 

Just to update - the 500 gig is a hitachi deskstar not a seagate.

I have stuck the 500gig into a usb enclosure and reformatted it. Still nothing - when I put it into the caddy and stick it into the drive bay, machine won't boot - it starts the dell bios loader but stops at halfway and doesn't move forward - f2 for setup does nothing.

Any advice is appreciated - wanted to get this done today. thank you!

 

As your ssd install went through ahci mode,its giving bsod when you switch to ide mode.

Now why Seagate not getting detected,maybe its showing up in system as DVD drive and maybe maybe its trying to load windows from pseudo DVD.
I suggest upgrade your BIOS
Set your boot device as Intel ssd.

 

Thanks, I looked at the bios - the latest from dell is what is on this laptop.

With the older 160gb drive in the bay, it shows up as the sata ODD with the drive name correct.

 

Hi All;

I'm interested in performing this mod on my m17x-r2, however, I have a question, to which I think the answer will be no, but here goes anyway ...

If I remove the Bluray combo drive and replace this with a HDD caddy, can I create a RAID0 array with this Bay and Bay 1. (I currently have a Vertex III 240GB in Bay 0 and a single 500GB drive in Bay 1 - What I want is my Vertex III in Bay 0 and a RAID0 array across Bay 1 and CD/DVD Bay)

Cheers,

 

Hi, i'm new here and i'm actually hoping that you can help me. I bought the pata-sata caddy on ebay, and put it in my Acer 5920g. I'm ussing a Patriot 60gb SSD Pyro in the internal bay, and a WesternDigital 250gb in the Caddy.
Everytime I took the caddy out and put it back in, i've to enter the bios and change the boot order, because it recognizes the caddy as a Master and the internal bay as a Slave, and tries to boot from the caddy. The point is, i can start OK from both the internal or the caddy, but after a while, when trying to open or transfer big files, the caddy kind of collapse and slow down till it's unuseable. Of course, that means i cannot put the ssd there, i'm actually just using it with the hdd to play music and works relatively fine, but i cannot transfer any big file.
What can be the solution for me? Should i try the slave & mod?
thanks!

 

By the way, it sets the speed to UDMA-2, but that doesn't seem to be the problem, when i did a benchmark to test the speed of the drive it was something like 0.1 MB, and after a while it just stops working... should i try a new caddy?

 

My Sony Vaio VPCEB2UFX stopped booting past the windows logo a while ago so I took it to Canada Computers and they told me that there was a problem with the HDD SATA connection on the motherboard side. Makes sense since repair disks, reformatting and reinstalling OS, and trying linux boots off CD and USB didn't work (all froze at a blank screen/OS logo after beginning to load).
So my question is, if the problem was due to the SATA connection directly at the HDD bay, would I be able to use this method as my primary (and only) HDD? If so, I'd like to give it a shot instead of just throwing out my laptop.

 

I plan to use small SSD for swap file only in W7 64. Reason being that it is cheaper than 8GB DDR2 RAM.
How would hot swapping for optical drive look like in that case?

 

Hey. So I installed a 2nd HDD onto my laptop and im using HDparm when I use the command hdparm -S 2 dev/hdb it does make the HDD go into standby after 10 seconds but once i shutdown and boot back up it stays in active/idle according to hdparm. I realize this is what the batch file is for but im a little unsure how to do this.

Also what does this part of it mean exactly, &REM set standby timeout=1min ?

Thanks.

 

I'm also having this issue.

 

Don't know if other ask this before, but

Does Windows 7 turn off disk after x minute equals to hdparm standby?
The 2nd HDD is nice, but the spin sound sometimes drive me crazy (not accessed when I check taskmanger)~~

 

Hi I would like to replace ODD of DELL E6400 with a drive caddy.
What are at the moment the best option on the market ?

Thanks

 

hi there,

i bought a used hp 2530p and i also want to use a caddy with a ssd.

i got a 2.5" 90 gb ssd sata 2 (9.5mm) and want to use this drive with the caddy in my 2530p.
i read the caddy is bootable.
so is it possible to do a fresh installation of win 7 with this ssd-caddy?

i only want to use the 1.8" build in drive as secondary drive. i dont want to use it as primary, because it is too slow.

if i boot my notebook, do i always have to choose which drive i want to boot? (even if there is no win-system on the 1.8" drive?)

best wishes,

moe

 

All you need to do to boot from the 2.5" SSD in your optical bay caddy is to set the boot order to be 1. Upgrade/optical bay 2. Harddrive. Details for this are in Configuring the Boot Order in the System BIOS HP EliteBook 2530p Notebook PC - HP Customer Care (United States - English) .

Yes, you can for a fresh install of Win7 with the ssd-caddy. Just create a USB-Win7 installation media as shown at Install Windows 7 From USB.

 

@nando4,

thank you very much!

 

if you don't take it apart, how to do the hotswap between HDD and CD-ROM?
Is there any button on caddy you can push to pop the HDD out, and then put the CD-ROM in?